Today, anyone with a connection to Norfolk is invited to contribute to a very modern attempt at social history making: #blognor09. The idea is that if you add the tag #blognor09 to Norfolk-relevant blog entries, twitter posts, photographs posted on flickr (or send in - strange to write this - more old-fashioned direct emails) your contribution will be gathered up and pinned to a giant interactive BBC map and preserved for posterity. The result will, hopefully, be a mass-observation style snapshot of the region as the public sees it right now.

For my contribution – this blog – I visited Thetford. About 30 miles down the road from my home in Norwich, Thetford is a town known to me – and most other people in the region, as a place bypassed on the A11 and rattled through on the train out to the Midlands. I'd never had reason to stop there and probably won't again. But it is worth at least one visit.

After a short trudge through the typically dispiriting environs of the station and past an ugly church of the Latter Day Saints, Thetford turns into a pleasant little town. Even the repeated presence of that newest fixture on the English landscape, the boarded-up business, hardly diminished the attraction of White Hart Street and its old stone, and wattle-and-daub buildings. When I reached the medieval church of St Mary the Less, which was also boarded up and its graveyard overgrown, the abandonment began to seem positively romantic.

I looped around towards town over a metal bridge, savouring the smell of cut grass in the air, the sound of birdsong and the gossiping of the rivers Thet and Ouse as they joined up around the green banks of Button Island. It was quiet and peaceful and sleepy, and seemed like a place that the troubles of the world had hardly touched (and which would never trouble the rest of the world). The ideal setting, then, for that hymn to English home comforts, Dad's Army.

Except, of course, that this impression was entirely wrong. Once, Thetford was home to Boudicca and was crushed by the Romans. Today, a large number of Lithuanian and Polish shops bear witness to a new kind of international influence. And then there's the small matter of Thetford's most famous son, Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer and intellectual whose incendiary republicanism played a significant role in both the American and French Revolutions.

Paine is commemorated in a golden statue outside the town hall, grasping a copy of The Rights of Man and wielding a quill as if it's a weapon. Clearly, the intention is to show that the pen is mightier than the sword. An apt sentiment. If anyone proves the enduring power of the well-turned sentence it's Tom Paine. This is a man who still has the ear of the US president, in the 200th year after his death.

So it was that in Thetford, my mind went back to Obama's inauguration and his reference to Paine's first Crisis:

"In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"'Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].'"

Did Paine think of the easeful warmth of a Thetford spring and the gentle sounds of the Thet and Little Ouse when men, shivering by the Delaware, heard his words? Or did he harbour darker thoughts about his home town? Was it the quietness of Norfolk that drove him so often round the world and into danger? Or was it the injustice he saw there that fuelled his righteousness? It's worth noting that Thetford was a classic Rotten Borough in Paine's day, where a rich self-serving elite got away with murder and a poor man could be hanged for stealing a sheep. The kind of place that could easily have prompted Paine's famous sentiment: "When, in countries that are called civilised, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government."

And if Paine had mixed feelings about his hometown, the feeling is mutual. When his statue was first mooted in the 1960s, a Tory town councillor declared it "an insult to the town" and tried to stop its erection. When that failed, his council tried to get an inscription about Paine being a "traitor" engraved alongside the current inspiring inscription: "My country is the world, my religion is to do good."

Fortunately, reason prevailed and the statue remains untarnished.

Yet fate might still have had the last laugh. A new statue has recently been unveiled in Thetford dedicated to another famous resident: the Maharajah Duleep Singh, the last royal ruler of the Punjab who was exiled to nearby Elveden in the 19th century. The birthplace of one of history's most persuasive republicans has become a place of pilgrimage for Sikh royalists. And that isn't the cruellest irony. Tom Paine might have a statue in Thetford, but it has been so positioned that he gazes out forever over the town's main thoroughfare: King Street. It would be enough to make him turn in his grave, if only he had one.